With the latest release of Solus, I feel I should ask. I have had my eye on this particular distro for some time now. I even did a test installation about two years ago, but it didn’t feel as complete as I needed it to be.
I am looking for a solid, beginner-friendly rolling Linux distribution for general use. Multimedia, gaming, coding etc. Do you recommend Solus? If so, why? Why not? Looking forward to your thoughts.
No, it was a small dev team and it died out. Stick to distros that are established and have been around for awhile. You’ll see a lot of small hobby distros that’ll disappear over night. For an easy beginner rolling release distro, I’d suggest openSUSE rolling. They are an established company and aren’t going anywhere. Their releases are very stable and have a very easy to use GUI installer and updater in the distro. It’s general use as well, not a lot extra besides the desktop environment, tools, browser, etc. Seems exactly what you’re looking for and is all out of the box.
Solus didn’t die. Source: Solus Blog
Thank you for your suggestion of Tumbleweed (I assume you are writing about). Checking that out as well.
I think they mean the fact that the development team has seen some shuffling and the project stagnated for a bit. I love Budgie, which comes from Solus, but I’d rather use it on a different distro than using Solus, which seems a bit off-balance at the moment. Give them time to stabilize before trying them.
But how are new and small distros going to grow if no one uses them?
My advice is to experiment with distros you find interesting, but not on your main devices.
I don’t think the advice is that people should ignore small distros but that small distros won’t be as beginner friendly.
Really learning to function in Linux involves a lot of searching for what went wrong and being in a larger distro increases the chance that somebody has run into your problem before.
I agree. Perhaps I got confused when reading the other comment.
Small distros aren’t good ones for beginners, because support plays a great role into they first experiences.
That you should take them with a grain of salt and see their track record over time. If a distro is only up for a month and ran by one person, maybe don’t make that your daily driver. If that same one person keeps going for 3 years, maybe consider it having more legitimacy. Even mediumish size distros like Void Linux almost crashed over night. Big ones like Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE won’t ever die over night.
I used Solus for a while on my laptop. One day a minor kernel version bump caused my display to stay black. I reported it to the Solus bug tracker and they told me it’s not their problem, and I should deal with the kernel devs. But of course the kernel devs reasonably tell you to deal with your distribution if they’ve modified the kernel, which Solus had.
So I installed Tumbleweed and never looked back. I don’t miss Solus. It was fine, but I don’t trust it now, the way I do trust Tumbleweed.
The nice thing about a decent sized distro is when something specific about your hardware or config causes you a problem like that there will be others who experience the same thing, and it is easier to get help. And if you want to be cautious, you can even wait a bit for updates and watch the forums to see what pops up.
That said, I used to use a smaller distro (also a Tumbleweed user now) and they were always good about helping users troubleshoot such issues, so your experience doesn’t speak well for Solus. The character of the user forums is an important thing to look at when choosing a disto.
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I used it as my main distro for about a year, and moved on right before the “abandonment saga” happened. It was a nice and performant distro, but lacked some stuff I needed, mostly support from a few projects and apps I needed to use.
I wouldn’t recommend it as a main distro for at least 5 years after what happened, but would keep an eye out to use on a spare machine or a VM.
Nowadays I’d either settle on openSUSE Tumbleeweed for rolling-release. I’m personally more insterested in stability though (and not having to update stuff every 2 days or so), so I’m going team Debian.
Ikey being involved again doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. Josh has been very reliable though.
Drama aside, Solus’ target userbase has always been exactly what you’re describing.
